Sacred Games (133 page)

Aadil still worked assiduously in the fields, every day. Every day, he walked the length of the addah, making sure it had not moved again. One evening, that August, he found two men waiting for him at the end of the field. One was tall, with enormous muscled forearms and a belligerent air. But it was the other one, short and dark and round-faced, who was clearly the leader. ‘Are you Aadil Ansari?' he said, holding on to the ends of his gamcha and bouncing on his heels.

‘I am.'

‘Lal Salaam. I am Kishore Paswan.'

Aadil didn't quite know how to react to Kishore Paswan's upraised fist. He had never been the recipient of a red salute before, and he fumbled and put his hand on his chest. Kishore Paswan didn't seem to mind. He was grinning up at Aadil.

‘I heard you are having lots of trouble.'

‘Who are you?' The Naxals had never been very active around Rajpur, and Aadil had never heard of Kishore Paswan.

‘I told you who I am. I am Kishore Paswan Jansevak. Come. Tell me what's been happening.'

Kishore Paswan took Aadil by the elbow and led him to the side of the field, where they all squatted in the shade of a tree. Paswan had a very soft voice, and a soothing manner. Aadil found himself telling his whole story, not just about the stolen land, but about his struggles in primary school, and his times in Patna. Paswan listened, and then told Aadil about himself. He was from near Gaya, the son of daily-wage labourers. His
family had been active in the anti-feudal movement, and his Naxalite father had worked with the great revolutionary Chunder Ghosh. When Kishore Paswan was three, both his father and Chunder Ghosh had been shot and killed by a police agent disguised as a businessman. So Kishore Paswan had been politically active since youth, working against the oppressions of the upper castes and the state. History had remade him into Kishore Paswan Jansevak. He was now a functionary in the People's Revolutionary Council, which was an above-ground, legitimate organization dedicated to the betterment of the poor. ‘We are dedicated to justice, my friend,' Kishore Paswan said. ‘If you are politically aware, you are with us. If you are intelligent, you have no choice but to be with us. We want to unite the proletariat. We have in our membership every caste, every religion. Some of our leadership are even Brahmins. It does not matter. If you understand the structure of oppression, then you cannot help being with us.'

As Kishore Paswan went on to describe this structure, Aadil saw that his logic was impeccable. That feudalism still existed in Rajpur was obvious, that the reactionary classes oppressed the proletariat went without saying. But now, as Paswan instructed Aadil in the subtleties of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Aadil saw how precisely the theory fitted the facts. Of course Aadil had heard of Marx before, he had discussed Lenin with his hostel-mates, but he had been too preoccupied with zoology to delve into the works of Mao, to read or investigate, to understand the Great Helmsman's long march and the spring thunder his party had once proclaimed over India. Now it seemed to Aadil that what Paswan was telling him had a scientific elegance about it. Of course, of course. The institutions of the state were reactionary by nature, defined by the class positions of those who controlled them. The police and other executive arms of the state were used to destroy, to exterminate the developing class struggle of the landless peasants. What was always referred to as a ‘law and order problem' in the reactionary newspapers was actually the natural outcome of a socio-political system which generated poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and all-round underdevelopment for more than ninety per cent of the toiling population in mostly rural areas, while producing immense wealth and extravagance for a handful of parasitic classes in the villages and the cities. The aim of the class struggle was to eliminate feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism. The contradictions of the present class-divided society would result in its destruction, leading to a truly classless society on earth. The dialectic itself would produce the
necessary next stage, the workers' paradise. This could not be denied. It was inevitable.

Paswan spoke rapidly, without pause. His words fell like scouring medicine on Aadil and burned away the last vestiges of bourgeois illusion from his mind and his heart. He knew then how ridiculous it had been of him to invest hope in a rotten system. To trust the reactionary classes in any way was a sign of weakness and ignorance. Aadil wanted to participate, to somehow take part in the revolution.

‘That's easy to say,' Paswan said, ‘hard to do.'

‘I will do anything.'

‘Good. Mind you,' Paswan said sternly, ‘the first battle that a revolutionary must win is against his own ignorance and bad habits. We expect nothing less than ideal social behaviour, worthy of a revolutionary. You must take control of yourself. You must examine yourself and your actions ceaselessly, and dedicate yourself completely to the struggle. No less is acceptable.'

So Aadil immediately, from that day on, gave up tadi. He never drank again. He applied himself to the struggle. Comrade Jansevak instructed him to educate the poor in and around Rajpur, to raise revolutionary consciousness, and to keep farming, to not lose heart. Fortified, Aadil continued. With the backing of the PRC, accompanied by Comrade Jansevak, Aadil revisited the karamchari, who was now exceedingly co-operative and productive. A land suit was promptly filed against Nandan Prasad Yadav.

A week later, Aadil had no water. The irrigating water that fed his fields came from the river, to the east, and through Prem Shanker Jha's land. This had been the arrangement for decades, for generations. Now Prem Shanker Jha closed the narrow channel and declared that he needed the land for cultivation, that the movement of water across his fields was a burden that he was unwilling to carry any more. He refused to listen to any arguments. Aadil was no longer willing to plead. Prem Shanker Jha and Nandan Prasad Yadav were not on the best of terms. They were rivals for influence and money and land, the political candidates they backed sometimes clashed with each other. And yet, they were now colluding. As Comrade Jansevak observed, this is the way of the capitalist world, bitter enemies will become brothers to protect class interests. Don't worry, Comrade Jansevak told Aadil, we will struggle.

But that Monday, Aadil was arrested. At five in the morning, he was pulled out of a bitter, thrashing sleep, and taken to the thana. The FIR had
already been prepared: one Aadil Ansari, acting in collusion with a group of eleven unknown men, had surrounded two constables at the Garhi chowki and overpowered them. The intruders had then broken into the armoury in the chowki, and decamped with nine .303 Lee-Enfield rifles and four hundred and sixty rounds of ammunition. The two constables had been tied up and blindfolded, but they had clearly seen the ringleader, whom they recognized as the notorious Naxal leader, Aadil Ansari.

On the basis of this lie, Aadil was remanded to custody for ten days. The policemen beat him every day, with straps, and with lathis on the soles of his feet. Noor Mohammed made frantic outcries at Nandan Prasad Yadav's gate, and sat whole days outside the thana and wept. After ten days, Aadil's bail request was refused, on the grounds that he presented the risk of violence to society at large, and to the two witnesses of his crime in particular. He was sent a hundred kilometres south to the Hasla Aadarsh Kara to await trial. Aadil spent the next two years and three months in this jail, through a series of trial dates and postponements, all because the two constables were unable to come to court and testify. First both were ill, then they were posted along the Nepal border, then they were ill again. They were simply unavailable. The trial, of course, had to happen, and so Aadil was kept in jail. He surprised himself with his patience, his good spirits, in this fetid, crumbling edifice that crushed so many men. It had been built fifty years before, to house six hundred prisoners, and it now held two thousand. The food smelt of rot, and fevers and dysenteries took a steady toll. But Aadil was never depressed or afraid. He did not pray any more, not even once a day. He dedicated himself to the study of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the campaigns mounted by peasants and workers in every part of the world. Aadil read the pamphlets and books sent to him by Comrade Jansevak, and educated every man he came into contact with. In Hasla jail, Aadil was soon known as the Professor, and this was the sobriquet that he took with him to the outside.

Aadil and four others escaped one bright December morning when the chief minister was visiting the district. Many from the jail staff had been assigned to duty on the roads and for the minister's bandobast, leaving only a skeleton force in the prison. Aadil and his fellow prisoners overpowered two guards behind the jail laundry, and then climbed a wall, using wooden racks and cords from the laundry to construct makeshift ladders. Two days later, Aadil was in Rajpur, in conference with Comrade Jansevak. ‘I want those bastards,' he said.

‘Are you sure?' Comrade Jansevak said. ‘If you kill two policemen, you will run for ever.'

‘I am already running. Don't worry. I've decided. I have left everything behind.'

Aadil killed the two constables named in the FIR four days later. Five policemen were actually killed in the blast, but Aadil was concerned about his two accusers. The others were just accidental profit. Comrade Jansevak had put Aadil in touch with the People's Action Committee, which was the military arm of the PRC. The PAC had the necessary intelligence and the matériel for the job. They knew that an inspector and four constables would be travelling in a jeep to the village of Ganti, to investigate a clash between rival groups in a land dispute. For three days the PAC had hidden scouts watching the dirt road that the police would have to drive down to Ganti. On the fourth day, the police jeep was seen approaching at eleven in the morning. It was confirmed that Aadil's two constables were in the back of the jeep. The jeep passed, and as soon as it was out of sight, the PAC platoon and Aadil went to work. Aadil watched the PAC men lay the landmine in the road. They were using sticks of RDX, which they called gelatin. The platoon leader grinned as he lowered the Dalda tin containing the explosive into the hole they had dug. Aadil had not been told any of their names, for reasons of operational security.

The platoon leader said, ‘Professor, do you know what this is?'

‘I do.'

‘And you still stand so close by?'

‘Comrade Jansevak told me that you were an expert.'

The platoon leader grinned. Then Aadil helped him unreel a black wire back from the road, up the side of an addah and then behind it. Two men from the platoon went along the wire, kicking dirt over it. Then they all lay behind the rise, the PAC men cradling their rifles. The sun came over them and they waited. Aadil's head was pounding. The platoon leader told him about the raid on a mine in Singhbhum that had netted them twelve hundred gelatin sticks. They waited. At two-thirty a scout signalled from the east.

‘The jeep is coming,' the platoon leader said. ‘You want to do it?' He held up the end of the black wire, separated out into two strands. In front of him there was a red car battery. ‘You have to do it with exact timing. Too soon or too late and it won't hit.'

Aadil shook his head. He wanted to do it, but he wanted to be sure. His
hands were shaking and he wasn't sure that he could manage the calculation, of moving object and distance and the near-instantaneous speed of electricity. The jeep bumped along the road and came closer and now Aadil could hear it. It appeared that it had passed the spot which Aadil had marked as the location of the mine, but then it vanished in a white and brown spasm of the earth that shut Aadil's eyes. When he blinked them open there was a gout of black dust and smoke and then a blackened metal hulk crashing far from the road, on the near side towards the PAC platoon. The men cheered and hooted.

‘Forty feet,' the platoon leader said. ‘It flew at least forty feet.'

Aadil ran behind them, his ears still ringing, as they went forward. A small shower of paper came drifting down, and the air smelt of petrol. Then Aadil saw a policeman's body, but only half of it. The boots and the legs were quite intact, and the brown leather belt still held its polish. But above the waist there was a dirty tangle of innards, and nothing else. Aadil's throat clutched, and he had to turn away. Control yourself, he told himself. You have performed many dissections. This is nothing new.

‘First time is always hard,' the platoon leader said. He kicked away a smouldering metal strut and bent over to get a look at another body underneath. The chassis of the jeep, behind them, was covered with a fine layer of lapping blue flames. ‘Don't worry. The habit will get into you. Some day you'll do it yourself.'

‘I'm not worried,' Aadil said. The nausea he had just suffered was just a spasm of the body, his mind knew better. The policemen were class enemies, and they had to be executed. There wasn't really a choice.

As he expected, Aadil got used to the killing. He operated mainly in Bhagalpur and Munger. Comrade Jansevak thought he was too well-known around Rajpur, and there were now too many informers and enemies who would take a personal interest in doing him harm. So Aadil fought his war far from home. He carried a rifle and a Rampuri knife, but his main work was education and indoctrination. He went from village to village, moving mostly at night and never crossing an empty field during the day. He conducted classes for the peasants, gathering them at midnight by the light of a single lantern. He taught them their own history, and offered them a vision of the future: equality, prosperity, no landlords, no debt, each person the owner of his own fate.

With each passing week, Aadil became more depended on by the commanders of the PAC. Since he was the Professor, he never commanded a squad, but he rose rapidly through the ranks and became a trusted tacti
cian. The landlords had their armies, and the police their power and brutality, and so the game was played out across the hills and the riverine mazes of the diara. Aadil planned the operations, the executions in response to massacres, the ambushes of police convoys and kidnappings of engineers and doctors. He discovered an instinctive feeling for feint and counter-blow, for subterfuge and evasions. He delighted in the success of his schemes, and he was not impervious to the admiration of his comrades, and so he trained himself to be a good soldier. He was no longer sickened by the smell of human blood. He took part in a few operations, most notably the ambush of an eight-vehicle police party that was returning from an investigation of the killing of a sarpanch. There was a hot exultation in the firing of an SLR at the khaki-clad figures scuttling about the road below, confused and terrorized by the mines which had blown their three lead trucks. The plan had been entirely Aadil's. The sarpanch, who had been an informer and a reactionary right-winger, had been executed in a particularly public way, by beheading in the middle of the village market on a busy Tuesday. Since the sarpanch had been close to the local MLA, Aadil knew that the police would send out a substantial convoy to investigate and reassure. So Aadil and two squads had waited for them on the road, and found them. The final bag was thirty-six policemen killed, many injured, for not one PAC casualty. The Professor again won high praise, but what Aadil valued the most, afterwards, was the memory of the rifle jumping against his cheek, the smell of the powder. The sensations told him that he was not useless, discarded. He had tilted his shoulder against the leaning of the world, and he would shift it on its axis.